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Baker's Dozen

Beautiful Artefacts: Jon Spencer's Favourite Albums
Julian Marszalek , September 25th, 2012 11:41

The Blues Explosion frontman whittles down his favourite albums to a mean 13

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The Flaming Groovies - Teenage Head
This is a record of its time and you can fit the Groovies into a time. I got into this record in 1990 or something. They’re like the cool version of The Rolling Stones. The difference between this and Behind The Magnolia Curtain was that I didn’t have an idea who RL Burnside was or who Sonny Burgess was but when I listened to Teenage Head I knew who Doctor Ross was and who Robert Johnson was. There are some covers on this record and then there are some original songs which are just covers that they had re-written!

It all works. This period of the Groovies when they still has Ray Loney is my preferred period and I wasn’t so crazy when they went to England and got the different singer and did all the stuff with Dave Edmonds and became all Beatlesy. It was more rock’n’roll and this was when I was starting to get into Elvis and Jerry Lee Lewis and all of the Sun artists.

The Flaming Groovies were a band that were influenced by all these different styles and they’re were achieving something new with it. It’s not like they were inventing anything new but they made it their own.